The Short Fiction of Lawrence Dorr (v)

I can't help wonder whether that robin just outside our door has a problem. He can't seem to get it right--that song he sings over and over and over again, I mean. If I had a piano, I'd tap it for you, or for him (or her), to see if maybe I could help out. On and on it goes, liltingly. Really, I'm not complaining. 

To him (or her) I don't think the repetition is particularly frustrating. After all, this is what he's looking at this morning as a new day rises. What's out east is worth singing about, although "red in the morning," my Coast Guard father used to claim means "sailor take warning."

Maybe that robin's song is a warning. 

Nah. It's what he (or she) does. He sings. Most writers do, I guess, although how well they sing and how successfully is not their office to judge. 

There's something akin to the robin's song in Lawrence Dorr's stories. Like my singing neighbor just outside, the melody Dorr creates seems as much chorus as the robin's, a song he can't get out of his head--or won't. 

Most imaginative literature does what Lawrence Dorr does in his stories because most poets and artists look at the seeming chaos all around, collect what they experience in fragments, in shards of human experience, and try to make it harmonize or rhyme, try to make it sing, endow the world's brokenness with meaning. Art makes meaning out of what seems meaningless.

Like that songster with the orange vest outside my window, those of us who sing in the morning can't ever get it quite right. But that doesn't stop the singing or the song.

Dorr's "Verity Unseen" is set in England, but don't be deceived by change of setting. Britain or not, he's singing the same song. 

A writer and his family are living in England, where his wife is completing a degree. They have a seaside cottage that seems largely unheated to them--they're Floridians after all. He'd sent a collection of his stories to his mother, in Hungary, still under Russian rule, with little confidence it would ever get to her.

But because they're in Britain it did, and she sends a letter back, a letter that aches. "Beloved," she writes, "I do not expect that we will see each other again in this life.. . .I try not to be bitter." Every week, she says, reports surface of people killed while attempting to escape. 

He spirals into a darkness he knows all too well, then turns on the BBC and listens to the story of a California man awaiting execution. 

Once again, halogen lights flash into his past as if from nowhere. "He too had once awaited execution, standing against a weather-beaten carriage gate." Once again he's victimized by the war-torn past, a history which is by no means behind him. 

Images tumble all around him. His kids are at church dying eggs for Easter Sunday. It's all a jumble. Then, without any transition, the reality of Good Friday comes upon him, of visage of Jesus, "his tortured body bent over carrying the upper beam of the heavy cross on his way to Calvary. He would be nailed on with real nails."

It's a vision he can't help seeing. "He beheld the suffering, pain-wracked Man trudging toward Golgotha. He began to cry."

On Easter morning he gets up early, stokes the fire, and marches quietly to the WC, taking in every last image in the world around him--sound of the shingled sea, the "congregations" of wood violets and daffodils, the bleating of the sheep "on the shrouded hills," and "the unbearable majesty of the rising sun."

Once more, he falls to his knees, as he once had, awaiting a single shot from Russian rifle, expecting death. "But instead there was light without any shadows. He closed his eyes overwhelmed by love."

That's the story Lawrence Dorr keeps telling, the song he won't stop singing. It's what he does. Like my neighbor the singer, he too sees the dawn.